Patience Isn’t Just a Virtue
It is your only hope.
We live in a fast paced world and your business is likely no exception. Change has accelerated. Feedback has accelerated. And all of this results in a tremendous amount of pressure to move quickly. But has it…?
If you consider the project plans of most companies, from Fortune 500 to startup, they really aren’t moving faster. To compensate for this acceleration, most businesses have chosen to go bigger, not faster. These big projects get big budgets. They are resourced with big teams. And they build big roadmaps because, “while the process will be hard and complicated, in the end it will definitely be worth it”.
Here is a secret:
It is not that hard. It is not that complicated, once you understand it. It is just going to take some time.
Time? That is exactly what your business doesn’t have! With the world changing all around you, how can you possibly subscribe to a process that will take time?
To paraphrase some Kung Fu, Okinawan, and Jedi Masters:
Patience, young business leader.
Time, in most cases, is really not the enemy. Time can actually help make certain your efforts will be successful. But to assure a good outcome, you need to do a few things.
The five year plan didn’t work so well for the Soviets. Corporate America has mostly downshifted to three, but the days of centralized top down planning should have fallen with the Berlin Wall. In the new age of accelerated feedback, creating long term roadmaps and multi-page gant charts is an exercise in futility.
Top down thinking needs to be limited to long term goals, not detailed planning. There is a reason daily planners only have 365 pages. To look too far forward is to guarantee failure. Your people will spend too much time worrying about hit delivery dates and milestones and far too little time understanding their changing environment, accepting feedback, and evolving your business plan.
Stop and Think
Aside from being my favorite two words, just ask my children, this is a necessary refrain if you are going to turn a complicated and daunting task into something more manageable and therefore far more likely to be ultimately successful. Once you have set your top down goals, you need to examine the series of activities that is likely to get you there.
If you do this well, you will quickly see that any journey is a series of repeated steps. You don’t need to do 1000 things. You need to do 10 things, 100 times. In that fact, there is great power. An organization that recognizes and embraces this concept can become very efficient at its 10 things. Think of all the practice you will get!
And the final secret:
The world isn’t moving any faster. It only appears that way because we live in a time where feedback comes much more quickly.
This fact is critical. There are still only 24 hours in a day. Humans still sleep most nights and typically for 6–8 hours. We don’t grow up any faster. We aren’t working more hours in a day, or even a lifetime. We really aren’t moving any faster, but information is.
Our world hasn’t accelerated, but the feedback we receive has and that creates the perception that things are moving faster. If you have ever owned both a sports car and a minivan, you’ve recognized this effect before. At exactly the same speed, you will feel like you are going faster in the sports car. This perception occurs because sports cars are lower to the ground, placing the passengers closer to the road. That extra few inches accelerates our visual feedback and give us the illusion we are moving more quickly.
Putting these together can create a tremendous advantage
Set goals, not plans. Understand that the pathway to your goals will most likely come through a smaller set of repeated activities. Embrace the speed with which we are able to gather feedback in the 21st century. This combination will make you more nimble, more responsive, and probably faster (just like that sports car).
More powerfully, time is now your friend. The accolades of history do not belong to those who were first (see my other articles on historic attribution). They belongs to those who executed in the face of change and adversity.
With goals not plans, you have freedom while maintaining clarity of purpose. With an iterative process that embraces repetition of a few key activities, you will build mastery and efficiency. And by recognizing the flood of information and feedback available to you, you can rest assured that you will be able to adapt more quickly.
So rest assured, there is hope, but that hope rests in your ability to be patient.
To quote the Oracle of Omaha:
Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.
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